THERE THERE

KRISTEN KOSMAS

“Nobody, and I mean nobody, holds a candle to [Kosmas’] writing. No gimmicks, no flash just sheer poetic brilliance” – Andy Horwitz, Culturebot

Christopher Walken, on tour in Russia with a solo show inspired by everyone’s favorite Chekhovian sociopath, mysteriously falls off a ladder and is unable to perform. Karen, who apparently proofread the script once, is asked to go on in Walken’s place. A precarious bilingual performance duet ensues between Karen and her Russian interpreter, Leo. There There is a wildly unpredictable theatrical roller coaster about being the completely wrong person in the totally wrong place at the exact wrong time doing all the most wrong things. Directed by Paul Willis, performed by Kristen Kosmas & Larissa Tokmakova, design by Peter Ksander, translation by Matvei Yankelevich.

TRANSPORTATION NOTE: 7 trains from Manhattan are NOT running this weekend. As an alternate, take the N, Q train to Queensboro Plaza and then the free shuttle bus to Vernon Blvd-Jackson Ave. You can also find more alternate routes here: www.mta.info

Playwright and performer Kristen Kosmas and director Paul Willis have collaborated on numerous projects over the last 15 years, including her solo performance play The Scandal!, which received critical acclaim in Seattle and was nominated for a New York Independent Theater Award for Best Short Script in 2009. Kosmas’ plays and solo performances have been produced in Seattle, Austin, Boston, Chicago, and in numerous venues in New York. Kosmas is a founding member of the OBIE Award-winning performance series Little Theater; the Brooklyn-based experimental writer’s collective Machiqq/The Ladies’ Auxiliary Playwriting Team; and The Twenty-Five Cent Opera of San Francisco, a monthly event for the enactment of texts and theatricals.

The Chocolate Factory is Long Island City based incubator for new developments in experimental performance. The work of founding artists Brian Rogers & Sheila Lewandowski emphasizes collaboration combining movement, music, video and text to devise a means of storytelling that is immediate, collage-like, highly visual, and dependent on new technologies. These curatorial values tend to lead to work that is not easily categorized and requires new methods, more time, and a new kind of audience.

“It feels a little bit like the first New York I knew in the ’70s and ’80s. Not in a retro way at all, but art and residence and commerce were in a more balanced relationship than they are now. It’s not a reference to that time, just a little place where that is occurring again.” – Tere O’Connor, in a New York Times profile of the Chocolate Factory

The Chocolate Factory is located in Long Island City, at the first stop on both the 7 and G trains into Queens. L.I.C. is a waterfront neighborhood which in recent years has become known for its thriving arts community, and has among the highest concentration of art galleries, art institutions (among them MOMA’s PS1, the Institute of the Moving Image, Socrates Sculpture Park, Isamu Noguchi Museum) and studio space of any neighborhood in New York City.